Exhibition of Togo Mizrahi

Exhibition of Togo Mizrahi

An exhibition displaying photos and documents of the films directed by the eminent Egyptian director, Togo Mizrahi (1901-1986) at the Library of Alexandria.

Type

video

Production companies

Bibliotheca Alexandrina - Own production

Broadcaster

Bibliotheca Alexandrina

Audiovisual form

Library footage

Personalities

Mizrahi Togo

Primary theme

Museum

Secondary themes

Art, Culture and Knowledge / Cinemas

Society and way of life / Public areas and social issues

Art, Culture and Knowledge / Fine arts / Painting

Period of events

2005

Map locations

Egypt - Lower Egypt - Alexandria

Original language

Arabic

Media running time

4m29

Context

Context

Exhibition of Togo Mizrahi

Julien Gaertner

From the 1930's to the end of World War II, the actor, director and producer Togo Mizrahi was a major figure in the Egyptian cinema. Born in 1901, this half-Jewish, half-Italian man of the cinema came to symbolize the cosmopolitan nature of Alexandria before the war, city to which he remained faithful until 1938, when he decided to invest in Cairo's Wahbi studios. Over a period of 16 years Togo Mizrahi worked on more than thirty films, trying his hand in every creative department. He was a major figure in the golden age of film which made Egypt the spearhead of Arab cinema.

Multilingual, a doctor of economics having studied in Italy and France, he was 29 when he made his first film Kohayeen, later renamed Al Haweya. At that time he used a screen pseudonym, Ahmed Mishriki, adapting to a trend which preferred artists to use a name which would be acceptable to audiences of each of the three major religions. Togo Mizrahi abandoned this identity in the mid 1930's, when he stoppped making social films to concentrate on what the Egyptian cinema did most effectively: comedy and musical comedy. A booming production bringing together the biggest stars of Egyptian song and which earned the country the nickname "Hollywood on the Nile"

In his quartetAl-Mandouban (1934), Shalom al-Dragoman (1935), Shalom al-Riyadi et Al-Ezz Bandala (1937), Togo Mizrahi plays the part of Shalom, a character whose identity this time left no place for ambiguity. As well as these films he directed several very fine and successful comedies, using Faouzi and Ihsane Al Gazayerly, two stars from the theatre, to which Egyptian cinema owed a lot. His success with the public continued thanks to his collaboration with the actor Ali el Kassar, another famous Egyptian actor who he directed in a series of films taken from the Thousand and One Nights. Togo Mizrahi exploited his talent for comedy in musicals, with the singers Layla Mourad and hugely popular star Oum Kalthun – he cast her in Sallama (1945), her first role and today considered one of the greatest Egyptian films.

At the end of the Second World War it seems as though Togo Mizrahi was accused of Sionist propaganda, the sources are contradictory on this point, but whatever the truth, he was thrown out of Egypt. He left suddenly for Italy and settled in Rome, never returning to his native country. With his departure, which was followed inevitably by the progressive decline and then deaths of Egytpian cinema and song, a page was turned in the history of the country's cinema. Although it has never equalled the Golden Age of Togo Mizrahi, Egypt is still the cinematic master of the Arab world

Bibliography :

- Viola Shafik, Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class, and Nation, American University in Cairo Press, 2007

- Viola Shafik, Arab cinema. History and cultural identity, American University in Cairo Press, 2007